Mahalo to John and Michelle Kallas from Minnetonka MN for sharing this great image of a synchronized dive.
Are you getting bored reading about all of our incredible Whale Watch Cruises lately? If so, I guess you can skip your reading of this report, because Tuesday’s Mid-Morning Whale Watch Cruise was another good one.
Besides being literally surrounded by Humpbacks for much of the cruise (which meant no matter where you were on the boat, there was a whale or two to look at), we got to see a Humpback breaching 9 times in less than a minute just about 300 yards from us. This whale came out of the water so many times so quickly that we weren’t really sure if it was just one whale doing all that breaching… but if there were more than one Humpback, those whales must have been landing directly on top of each other. Ouch. We also got to see a breacher about 100 yards from us, and this whale breached 3 times.
Throughout the cruise, we must have seen more than 20 different Humpbacks — lots of spouts, lots of dorsal fins, and lots of flukes. We didn’t see any huge competitive pods — Tuesday’s Humpbacks were hanging out in pods of two or all by themselves.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Why don’t diving whales have to clear their ears like we do when we’re diving (or changing altitude in an airplane)? It turns out that whales have pretty rigid Eustachian tubes (those are the tiny tubes that run between your throat and your middle ear). So, unlike what happens to most of us who have to force air through our collapsible Eustachian tubes to equalize pressure in our ears, the airflow is basically unimpeded for our cetacean friends!